Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

  After dinner, Jun-sang would come up with excuses to leave the house. Though he was a university student, twenty years old and a head taller, he was still terrified of his father.

  “I’m off to see my friends,” Jun-sang would call out, naming one or another of his high school buddies. He promised to be home by 9:00 P.M., fully knowing it would more likely be midnight. Then he would bolt before his father could ask questions.

  The walk to Mi-ran’s house took about thirty minutes. His steps were urgent, even though he knew he might have a long wait before she finished helping her mother clean up after dinner. He had no excuse now to hang out around her house, because his friend from boxing class—her neighbor—had moved away. So he stood in the shadows, keeping so still that he could feel the pounding of his heart.

  By this time, the few places they might have gone on a date had closed. The Kyongsong County Culture Hall had no electricity to run the movie projector. The few restaurants that had operated years earlier were now closed. Along the waterfront in downtown Chongjin, next to the port, is the Chongjin Youth Park, on a lake, with rowboats and dilapidated amusement park rides, but travel regulations were so strict that a permit was required just to go from the suburbs into the city. They dared not enter the park in Kyongsong behind the train station where they might run into someone they knew.

  Long walks were the best choice. There was only one road, running through town and heading up to the mountains. They walked as briskly as they could without appearing to be running away from something. They didn’t speak as they walked past the billboard of a smiling Kim Il-sung, the signposts urging, “If the Party Decides, We Do” and “Let’s Protect Kim Jong-il with Our Lives.” A large colorful billboard of soldiers with bayonets was on one side of the street, where the road passed under a wide archway painted with blue flowers. Where the slogans petered out, the town ended and they could relax into the darkness. Their pupils dilated so they could take in the scenery without straining their eyes. Overgrown trees lined both sides of the road, leaning across to one another so that they formed a tangled canopy overhead. On clear nights the stars peeked through the branches. After a few minutes, the road began to climb so that a valley opened up on one side of the road as the hills rose steeper on the other. Thickets of pine clung to the rocky hillside, and between them, large unkempt mounds of purple wildflowers spilled over the rocks.

  The road crossed over a small stream with sandy banks and turned sharply to the left, where it opened up into the Onpho hot springs resort, known as the only place in Korea where the alkaline waters gushed out from the sand, and at temperatures of 130 degrees (Fahrenheit) they were reputed to cure ills from indigestion to infertility. Up the road, blocked off by checkpoints, was a villa for Kim Il-sung—one of about thirty in scenic locations around the country maintained for his convenience. A sizable military presence kept people from straying onto the private road. Visible from the road, although also closed to the public, was a spa reserved for party officials. The spa for the public, barely operating because of the economic crisis, was a dilapidated cluster of stone and concrete buildings. The resort opened in 1946—its founding was celebrated in a mural of Kim Il-sung surrounded by doctors—and looked as though it hadn’t been repaired since. The large overgrown grounds looked lush and wild by night. The young couple wasn’t interested in the scenery. Their excitement at being together made them forget even their aching feet as they walked for miles into the night.

  Walking and talking, that was all they did. The conversations were animated, consuming. When they were face-to-face, Jun-sang had none of the romantic bravado of his letters. He was polite, respectful, not daring even to hold Mi-ran’s hand until they’d been dating for three years. He courted her with his stories. He described his friends, his dormitory. He told her how the students were organized into battalions and had to march in step, arms and legs swinging, as they reported for roll call in the courtyard. He regaled her with a travelogue about Pyongyang, where she had been only once, on a primary school field trip to see the monuments. Pyongyang was the epitome of modernity—as the propaganda claimed, a city offering the world’s greatest achievements in architecture and technology. Jun-sang told her of the twin-towered Koryo Hotel with the revolving restaurant on top. He had never been inside, but gawked at the silhouette on the skyline—along with that of a 105-story pyramid under construction that was supposed to be the biggest in Asia. Jun-sang described the Pyongyang metro, a hundred yards underground, its stations adorned with chandeliers and gilded mosaics of Kim Il-sung.

  Back in Pyongyang he visited a foreign-currency shop and with his Japanese yen bought Mi-ran a barrette shaped like a butterfly and studded with rows of square rhinestones. To Mi-ran it was most intricate and exotic—she had never owned anything so pretty in her life. She never wore it because she didn’t want her mother to ask about it. She kept it hidden away, wrapped up in her underwear.

  Jun-sang’s experiences in Pyongyang gave Mi-ran a glimpse into a remote world of privilege. At the same time, it was hard to listen without a trace of jealousy. She was in her final year of high school and she feared it would be the end of her education. She had seen her sisters’ disappointment as one by one they discovered that their father’s background would thwart their ambitions. One even needed permission from the board of education to take the college entrance exam. Of her three sisters, only the eldest had gone on to college, and even then she was barred from the performing arts program despite an excellent singing voice. She ended up in a physical education program and dropped out halfway through to get married.

  Mi-ran had a sudden insight into her own future. She saw it laid out before her like a straight, featureless highway—a job in a factory, marriage (most likely to a fellow factory worker), children, old age, death. As Jun-sang prattled on about his roommates at the university, she grew more and more miserable. He sensed her depression and probed more deeply until at last she told him how she felt.

  “I feel I have no purpose in life,” she blurted out.

  He listened thoughtfully. A few weeks later, after he had returned to Pyongyang, he sent her a letter.

  “Things can change,” Jun-sang wrote. “If you want more in life, you must believe in yourself and you can achieve your dreams.”

  Mi-ran would later credit Jun-sang’s words of encouragement with changing her life. Once a good student, she had let her grades drop in high school. What was the point in knocking herself out if her path would be blocked anyway? But now Jun-sang’s ambition had rubbed off on her. She hit the books. She begged her mother to relieve her of her household chores so she could have more time to study. She asked her teacher to allow her to take the university qualifying exam. If she didn’t make it to college, she wouldn’t have herself to blame.

  To her great surprise, she was accepted into a teachers’ college. The Kim Jong-suk Teachers’ College—named for Kim Jong-il’s mother—was the best of the three teachers’ colleges in Chongjin. How did she get so lucky when her sisters had failed? Mi-ran herself was rather mystified, as she was a very good student but not at the top of her class. She’d thought there were many young women from better families with grades at least as good as her own who would have sought the coveted places in the freshman class.

  In the autumn of 1991, she moved out of her parents’ house and into the college dormitory. The school was in the downtown Pohang district, across from the museum and behind the park at the back of the Kim Il-sung statue.

  When she first arrived, Mi-ran was impressed. The dormitories were modern and each of the four girls who would share one room had her own bed rather than use the Korean bed mats laid out on a heated floor, the traditional way of keeping warm at night while expending little fuel. But as winter temperatures plunged Chongjin into a deep freeze, she realized why it was that the school had been able to give her a place in its freshman class. The dormitories had no heating. Mi-ran went to sleep each night in her coat, heavy socks, and mittens with a towe
l draped over her head. When she woke up, the towel would be crusted with frost from the moisture of her breath. In the bathroom, where the girls washed their menstrual rags (nobody had sanitary napkins, so the more affluent girls used gauze bandages while the poor girls used cheap synthetic cloths), it was so cold that the rags would freeze solid within minutes of being hung up to dry. Mi-ran hated the mornings. Just as in Jun-sang’s school, they were roused by a military-style roll call at 6:00 A.M., but instead of marching off like proud soldiers, they shivered into the bathroom and splashed icy water on their faces, under a grotesque canopy of frozen menstrual rags.

  The food in the cafeteria was even worse. North Korea was starting its “Let’s Eat Two Meals a Day” campaign, but the school took it a step further and offered only one meal—a thin soup made of salt, water, and dried turnip leaves. The cafeteria would sometimes add in a spoon of rice and corn that had been cooked for hours to plump up the grains. The girls in the college began getting sick. One of Mi-ran’s roommates was so malnourished that the skin was flaking off her face. She dropped out of school and others followed.

  It was an awakening for Mi-ran, who had been largely sheltered from the economic crisis by her industrious mother. She begged her mother to send her extra food from home, but after a year, she couldn’t take it any longer. Unwilling to forgo the education she had worked so hard for, she got permission from the school to live off campus. She slept on the floor of a relative’s apartment nearby during the week and went home to her parents on weekends. Normally, it would not have been permitted, but the school administrators were happy to have one less mouth to feed.

  JUN-SANG’S LIFE in Pyongyang was easier. The government put a high priority on the feeding and care of its most elite students—the scientists of tomorrow, whose achievements, it was hoped, would lift North Korea out of poverty. Jun-sang still marched off to the cafeteria with his battalion for three meals a day. Their dorm was heated at night and the electricity was kept on so that they could study after dark.

  Jun-sang and Mi-ran saw each other when he came home from the university on the two vacations students got per year, summer and winter, as well as during the spring leave, when students would weed the fields in preparation for sowing. In the past, Pyongyang students performed this duty on the outskirts of the capital, but with the shortage of food, it was decided to send them to their hometowns, where their mothers could feed them. Jun-sang used to dread the “volunteer” duty in the fields, but now he counted the days until he was released from the university. This longing was a revelation for him, as he had spent his life with his books and studies. “I really wanted to abandon everything and go back home to see her. I realized for the first time in my life what human emotion is all about,” he would later say of that period.

  In the fall of 1993, Jun-sang’s sister was getting married. Although his parents had told him not to disrupt his studies, Jun-sang saw it as a perfect excuse to surprise Mi-ran with a visit. He asked for a three-day leave to go home. By this time, the train service from Pyongyang to points north was sporadic at best, since the trains relied on electricity. Even if one managed to get a ticket, there was little chance of getting a seat unless the traveler was a high party official. The railroad stations were always full of waiting passengers. They would hang out in the dark, squatting and smoking until the train arrived. Then they would make a mad dash for it, scrambling in through broken windows, hanging on between the cars.

  No train tickets were available, so Jun-sang waited at the station, looking for a train to hitch. After one day he spotted a cargo train on the northbound track. A gift of some cigarettes to an engineer elicited the information that it was heading toward Chongjin. He hoisted himself up into a carload of coal, a towel wrapped around his face to protect his eyes. It was the first time in his life—but not the last—that he would hitch a ride on a cargo train.

  The last stop before Chongjin was Kyongsong—not far from Mi-ran’s village. Jun-sang hopped off and ran straight to her home. It was morning, the sun high in the sky, not the time of day that they normally met, but he couldn’t contain his impatience. He felt he would burst if he had to wait until dark to see her. It was a Sunday and he assumed she would be home from school. For the first time since they had started secretly dating, he went directly to the front door.

  The door swung open. Mi-ran’s mother gasped.

  Jun-sang’s face, like his clothing, was black with coal dust. Mi-ran’s mother was acquainted with Jun-sang from the days that he used to mix with the neighborhood kids, but now she didn’t recognize him. In any case, Mi-ran wasn’t home.

  “This very strange person came to see you,” her mother told her later. “What peculiar friends you have.”

  They had other close calls. Jun-sang’s father wasn’t pleased at all that his son had interrupted his studies for his sister’s wedding and questioned his motives. Jun-sang dared to enter Mi-ran’s house one evening when her mother was out and her father was working the night shift at the mine. But when her father unexpectedly returned, Jun-sang had to hide until the coast was clear.

  Later, Jun-sang and Mi-ran laughed for hours about these incidents. The truth was that they enjoyed deceiving their parents. The secrecy was not merely necessary, it was fun. It injected a frisson of the illicit and gave them a shared psychic space in a society where privacy didn’t exist. It was a relatively safe way to rebel against the confines of their lives.

  They laughed more. They talked more. Later, when they were older and living in comfort and security, they would strangely look back at those first years together as some of the happiest of their lives. In their giddiness, they paid little attention to what was happening around them.

  CHAPTER 6

  TWILIGHT OF THE GOD

  Kim Il-sung statue in Chongjin.

  IN JULY 1994, MI-RAN HAD JUST ONE EXAM TO GO BEFORE SHE would get her diploma from the teachers’ college. She had been assigned to work as an apprentice teacher at a kindergarten in downtown Chongjin. At noon on July 9, the children had gone home for lunch and Mi-ran was tidying up the classroom. She was about to unpack her own lunch and join the other teachers in the lounge when suddenly she heard excited footsteps careening down the corridor. She stepped out of the room to see that one of the girls had just run back from home. Her ponytail was damp with sweat and she was out of breath, so agitated that the teachers couldn’t make out what she was saying.

  “He’s dead, he’s dead,” the girl shouted, the words spilling out between gasps for breath.

  “What are you talking about?” a teacher asked.

  “The Great Marshal is dead!”

  The term could refer only to Kim Il-sung. The teachers were shocked that anybody, even a child, could talk that way. By kindergarten, children were supposed to know not to jest about the leadership. They took the girl by the shoulders and tried to get her to calm down. She was hyperventilating.

  “That’s blasphemy against communism,” a teacher scolded.

  “No, no. I saw it on television at home,” the girl insisted.

  The teachers still didn’t believe her. They knew well enough that five-year-olds could spin fanciful tales. Besides, the television news didn’t even start until 5:00 P.M. But they were disquieted enough that they wanted to investigate even if it meant leaving their lunch uneaten. The school didn’t have a radio or a television so they ran out into the street. The little girl excitedly steered them toward her apartment a few blocks away. They walked up the stairs and could see a crowd pushing its way toward the television set. Mi-ran tried to squeeze herself in. She couldn’t hear, but she could see the faces around her were all swollen and pale. A low moan emanated from the crowd and rose to the rhythm of sobbing. From the open windows, the heaving sound rose from the streets, which were still wet from an extraordinarily violent electric storm the night before.

  Mi-ran was numb. She couldn’t understand it. She was a schoolteacher in training, an educated woman who knew that mortals were mad
e of flesh and blood and lived finite lives. But Kim Il-sung, she thought, was something other. If the Great Marshal could die, then anything could happen.

  ALL NORTH KOREANS can recall with extraordinary clarity where they were and what they were doing when they learned of Kim Il-sung’s death. Over years of interviewing North Koreans, I’ve learned to pose the question “Where were you when you found out?” Invariably the interview subject, no matter how forgetful or recalcitrant, perks up. People who repressed so many of their traumatic memories of the 1990s can suddenly describe with great animation and detail their movements on that day. It was a moment when the ordinary laws of time and perception were frozen by shock.

  The year leading up to Kim’s death was one of the most tumultuous since the Korean War. Not only was the economy moribund, not only were China and Russia now cavorting with the enemy in Seoul, North Korea was fast cementing its reputation as a rogue state. The United Nations, egged on by an aggressive new U.S. president, Bill Clinton, was demanding that North Korea open its nuclear facilities to inspection. In March 1993, North Korea declared that it would pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in order to pursue the development of nuclear weapons, setting off the first post-Cold War nuclear panic. By the next year, as North Korea moved ahead to reprocess plutonium from its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, a sprawling nuclear campus forty-five miles north of Pyongyang, the Pentagon was drawing up plans for a preemptive strike. The North Koreans in turn were warning of imminent war. At one point, Pyongyang’s negotiator famously threatened to “turn Seoul into a sea of fire.”